Legal Question in Entertainment Law in California

I am interested to gather the public street and city addresses listed on IMDB.com to use for a commercial project. We'd use this content information as a starting point on which to build. According to IMDB's terms, all content on their website is copyrighted which might include street and city addresses.

http://www.imdb.com/help/show_article?conditions

However, is it possible that they have actually copyrighted this content?? I am interested in scraping the movie titles and address information for this commercial project except they explicitly say this is not permitted:

http://www.imdb.com/help/show_leaf?usedatasoftware

According to the following link, it's possible this content is covered under "Movie and Television Titles" but does not explicitly list street addresses:

http://www.imdb.com/licensing/index

Because I am not interested in paying the license fee at this time (and might consider it in the future it's a good investment), will it become a legal issue if I use the free data commercially assuming I am correct about it not being copyrighted? The data we can use is found here:

http://www.imdb.com/interfaces

So could you please clear this up for me so I can get a better understanding about what move I can make for my potential commercial project?


Asked on 9/14/10, 12:02 am

1 Answer from Attorneys
Keith E. Cooper Keith E. Cooper, Esq.

This is not a question that is really appropriate for this type of forum. What you should do is contact IMDB and discuss your situation with their lawyers and representatives. Somewhere in their terms and conditions, it should have an address and other contact information for you to reach the proper person.

If you are asking whether street and city names may be registered for copyright protection the short answer is 'no.' However, compiling information into a database requires a great deal of work (which, I'm sure, is the reason you want to use one that's already constructed). The person who compiled the database does have the right to protect it and prevent others from taking it without payment. Courts would support that.

In simple terms: would you go to the trouble and expense of compiling addresses and cities, then give it to someone else to make money off of?

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Answered on 10/26/10, 5:17 pm


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